FEATURE: Spotlight: Billy Nomates — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Billy Nomates

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I tend to mix slightly smaller artists with those…

that are rising or more established in this feature. Billy Nomates (Tor Maries) has been in the industry for a little while now but, as her eponymous album was released last year, I think her music reached a lot more people and audiences. I would encourage people to follow Billy Nomates, as her music and voice is among the most original and impressive around! I will bring in a positive reviews for her Billy Nomates album soon. Before, it is worth sourcing from a few interviews, just so that we can get a bigger picture and impression of a terrific young artist. Make sure you go and buy Billy Nomates. First, it is important to bring in some information. When she spoke with Sound Sniffer last year, we learn more about her start and lo-fi production style:

“How did Billy Nomates start? Have you always been doing music?

I’ve been in bands and done various bits and pieces since I was sixteen. I was in a band in Bristol in my early twenties for a few years. Before, I was always involved in projects or bands that weren’t mine and was just either fronting them or playing smaller roles. We were always on the fringes, never really took off. We had snippets of success but it always seemed to be ruined by someone getting married or breaking a leg.

I’ve always been involved in music but had a whole year away about two years ago. I found myself doing nothing musically, through no fault of my own really. Things just hadn’t worked and I had a year of a break. I moved down to the south coast and that’s where it started.

Your live performances and bedroom productions are wonderfully LoFi – Your debut single ‘No’ was quite polished in it’s sound. What can we expect from the album?

I did everything myself at home but I have really minimal equipment. The producer at invada was Geoff Barrow (of Portishead) and Stu Matthews. Working with invada was really intresting. I really respect the studio and the people that worked on it. We made minimal tweaks but they knew what they’re doing! I think it’s so unintentionally LoFi, that its got its own thing to it.

The album has a couple of songs in there that are a bit wildcard and a couple more polished like ‘No’. Invada were great, the producers just did that thing that only producers can do, where there’s a magic button they can press to make you go, ‘shit, that sounds good’. I don’t have that button in my bedroom”.

‘No’ has gotten a great reaction thus far. As debut singles go, it’s right up there. How have you felt about this positive publicity coming your way?

Yeah it’s been great; I’ve been getting some BBC Radio 6 play with it as well – which has been brilliant. It feels amazing to get something from my little bedroom work-station onto BBC 6 Music. Genuinely, when I hear it on the radio I feel like someone is going to come for me and rumble me”.

I really loved Billy Nomates’ music but I was not really aware of her (Maries’) background and her family life. Not that it is the most important thing, but I think that it has fed into her music and has affected how she approaches her career. In an in-depth interview with NME, we learn about her upbringing and the inception of the Billy Nomates project – we discover more about the themes and characters through her eponymous album:

““I’ve never really had money, but I was the poorest I’d been a couple of years ago after working a load of minimum wage jobs,” Maries explains. “I was miserable and poor and unfulfilled: I couldn’t write about fancying someone or anything nice. I thought: ‘If I’m going to write again, I have no option but to write about “ah, it’s all crap“.’”

Maries says that she considers herself to be on the edge of working class, but she does rue the absence of the full range of voices in music. “You don’t see a lot of working class people in any arts, you have to really look for it. You’ll instantly notice them, though, because there’s a tone of voice that’s allowed to come through that you haven’t heard for a long time.”

“I went through quite a bad depression stage,” Maries says, referring to the inception of the Billy Nomates project in early 2019. “I had a few months where a relationship had broken down, I was sleeping on my sister’s couch, I’d gone into a real funk and just didn’t want to leave the house or see anyone. I saw Sleaford Mods were coming to Southampton, so I just got a ticket by myself. I remember being in the crowd watching the warm-up band — Liines, a really good band — and some drunk guy shoved me on the shoulder and shouted: ‘It’s Billy no-mates!’ I’d just started recording at the time and I didn’t have a name. It’s genuinely one of those moments that I’ll never forget. That guy was a fucking genius.”

An entire rogues’ gallery of modern British character tropes are subjected to the Billy Nomates magnifying glass on the album: the posturing privileged, the Brexiteering nostalgists, the gig economy employers and, perhaps the most stomach-churning of all, the sleazy, lecherous types outlined on ‘Fat White Man’. Maries is firmly of the opinion that the music industry itself has some considerable work left to do when it comes to correcting its gender practices. “I can say that as a female in male bands growing up, I had some terrible experiences. But I think it’s changing at quite a rapid pace now, which is great.

Maries’ own experiences in bands made up the first “seven or eight years” of her time after moving to Bristol. “We were alternative folk that thought it was very arty — it was hideous stuff.” Eventually, everyone “got bored and got mortgages”, leaving her at a loose end, whereupon she eventually relocated to Bournemouth.

Life as a solo artist, however, has given Maries the control that satisfies her creative itch. “Now I just want to make stuff very selfishly. Eventually I just thought: ‘Why not?’ If I like it, maybe somebody else will like it”.

I will end with an interview from this year that captured my attention. First, I want to source from a review of. Billy Nomates. In terms of the best albums of 2020, this remarkable work was in many people’s end-of-year lists.

In their assessment of Billy Nomates, this is what Loud and Quiet had to say:

“Tor Maries only embraced self-prioritisation recently. Meaning: she’d spent a life not always putting herself first. The songwriter, who originates from the pork pie capital Melton Mowbray, spent years performing in groups around Bristol – there was some success, but little satisfaction.

It was only when Maries moved to Bournemouth, bought a ticket and flew solo to watch Sleaford Mods in 2019 – in a neat piece of circularity Jason Williamson pops up to rap about meat on ‘Supermarket Sweep’ – Maries decided to go it alone (she owes the moniker to a drunk man calling her “Billy Nomates” at that very show).

Billy Nomates is therefore what happens when you discard outside perceptions, pause people-pleasing and discover the power of self-expression. That’s why when observers question why Maries sometimes sings with a U.S. accent, she simply counters: it’s because I want to. Why not? Damn right.

These songs are Tor Maries’ experienced truth, then. ‘Modern Hart’ – a melancholic track that feels like a telegram to her old self – provides the opening. “Anyone can do it,” she sings over a grimy, Kim Deal-esque bassline.

It’s a subtle start, but things soon spice up with a string of acerbic and entertaining pot-shots. ‘Hippy Elite’ is about wanting to be more active in the climate emergency, but also needing to cover the household bills. ‘Happy Misery’ takes aim at anti-productive nostalgic mindsets (see also: Gazelle Twin’s ‘Better In My Day’) and ‘Supermarket Sweep’ a song about how the mundanity of financial survival chips away at aspirations. There’s the catchy centrepiece ‘No’ – about the empowering discovery of resistance.

Such everydayisms could come across as corny, but like her pals Sleaford Mods the songs are authentic, authoritative and frequently funny. They also pack a consistent and timely reminder: “Forgotten normal people are a force to remember”.

Just to round things off, I will bring in an interview from The Quietus from earlier this year. It is a fascinating interview. There was a particular section that really caught my eye – when Billy Nomates’ plans for 2020 were changed by the pandemic, she formed an unusual obsession:

“The plan for 2020 was to keep evolving Billy Nomates on the road, particularly around the record’s release, but then the pandemic hit. After recovering from the whiplash of an abrupt, undesired screech to a halt, just as momentum was really beginning to pick up, Maries was forced yet again to make the best of what she had. With lockdown shrinking her world considerably she started getting obsessed with the old payphones dotted around the Isle of Wight like monuments to a bygone era, some of which are no longer connected.

One booth on the bay for emergency calls stood out in particular. “You’d have to be so direct on a payphone, you’d have to really say you were in trouble. You couldn’t fuck about with it,” she says. “That fascinated me because it’s something we’ve kind of stopped doing. Maybe because we’re making sense of how we feel.” This fed into her new standalone EP, Emergency Telephone. “I got obsessed with this idea that it’s this dying line, that they’re all going to go soon. It’s like the last saloon for them. I got a bit obsessed and fascinated. I’m also very lonely! I just liked the idea, they’ve got their own weird appeal and their own strange stories to tell.” At the same time Maries was listening to some of her labelmates on Invada, a label which specialises in soundtracks. “I started to think, if I were to do narrative stuff, how would I go about it?”.

I will wrap up, but I was eager to highlight an artist who is among our very best. I know I have not included many bands in this feature through the months. I think it is because solo artists, to me, are producing more interesting and varied music – though there are some fantastic bands out there that warrant attention and big support. Billy Nomates is an exceptional talent that produced a remarkable album last year. I feel she will only grow in stature and continue to release such magnificent and unique work - and there is likely to be more new music this year. If you are new to her music and world, then make sure you investigate and…